Art of war

“ The artist of purest aim, sensitive to these emotions, withdraws naturally from the field of blood, confessing that no scene of battle finds a place in the highest Art,—that man, created in the image of God, can never be pictured degrading, profaning, violating that sacred image.
Were this sentiment adopted in literature as in Art, war would be shorn of its false glory. Poet, historian, orator, all should join with the Artist in saying, No battle-piece! ”

“ The means of attack and defence appear to have been among the first essays of human invention, and the miserable art of war has, perhaps, in succeeding ages, called forth the powers of the human mind in a greater degree than any of the arts of peace. ”

“ War—destructive outcome of the side of man’s nature which is hostile to all breadth of heart—can for the moment paralyse the outward activities of art, but can it ever chain its spirit, or arrest the inner ferment of the creative instinct? ”

“ The cardinal principles on which the art of war is based are few and unchangeable, resembling in this the code of morality; but their application varies as the theatre of the war, the genius and temper of the people engaged, and the kind of arms employed. ”

“ In like heathen spirit, it may be pleasant to behold a battle-piece in Art. But this is wrong. Admitting the calamitous necessity of war, it can never be with pleasure—it cannot be without sadness unspeakable—that we survey its fiendish encounter. ”

“ True, perhaps, for the moment; but, then, such times as these are in many ways unfavourable to the creative instinct; moreover they will leave in restless, sensitive natures lassitude, recoil, a sense of surfeit. Quite probably the war may produce a real masterpiece or two, formed out of its very stuff, by some eager mind innocent hitherto of creative powers, for whom actual experience of the sights and feelings of war may be a baptism into art. ”

“ The art of war is of vital importance to the State. ”

“ It is the fact that war is a great ecstasy of the social life, that it holds a high place in art, that history—our selective way of reacting upon human experience—is in a large measure the story of war, that its representations in dramatic forms are almost endless in variety; it is such facts that give us our clew to the nature of the problems of war, and also to the practical questions of its future. ”

“ The art of war, which I take to be the highest perfection of human knowledge, is a sufficient proof of what I say, especially in conducting armies and in offensive engines. Witness the now ways of rallies, fougades, entrenchments, attacks, lodgments, and a long et cetera of new inventions which want names, practised in sieges and encampments ”

“ Other modes of harmonizing influences arose more directly from the bosom of war itself. Gradually the mere practice of war, and the culture of war though merely viewed as a rude trade of bloodshed, ripened into an intellectual art. Were it merely with a view to more effectual carnage, this art (however simple and gross at first) opened at length into wide scientific arts, into strategies, into tactics, into castrametation, into poliorcetics, and all the processes through which the first rude efforts of martial cunning finally connect themselves with the exquisite resources of science. ”

“ War has often been praised because of its aesthetic nature, and its dramatic features. It is called a beautiful adventure. It is reproduced in pictorial art, represented in music, and thus glorified and adorned, showing at least that it can readily be made to appear beautiful if it does not in itself possess beauty. Those who think of war as related to play also connect it with art. ”

“ Sun Tzŭ said: The art of war is of vital importance to the State. ”

“ In this important crisis of battles, theory becomes an uncertain guide; for it is then unequal to the emergency, and can never compare in value with a natural talent for war, nor be a sufficient substitute for that intuitive coup-d'oeil imparted by experience in battles to a general of tried bravery and coolness. ”

“ I have only been anxious to show that in war a plan of operations may be often arranged, simply based upon the general principles of the art, without much attention being of necessity given to the details of the enemy's movements. ”

“ The apparatus of warfare, the art and method of fighting, changed absolutely every dozen years in a stupendous progress towards perfection, and people grew less and less warlike, and there was no war. ”

“ War 's a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art, Unless her cause by right be sanctified. ”

“ It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy’s one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him;
Straightaway, without waiting for any further advantage.
if twice as numerous, to divide our army into two. ”

“ They may be committed by kings and ministers to peace or war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science, or industry. A war is a true point of bifurcation of future possibilities. ”

“ It is some such high cause as this, such principles and emotions as these that give war nearly all the poetry and the glory that can ever be found in it. There is nothing of either in the mere exhibition of military might, the boast of conquest, the raw carnage, the hecatombs of slain. ”

“ “To mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy,” is one of the first principles in war, as has been frequently pointed out. ”

“ I will make the blood to stream from their joints, when the sculls of the warriors leap from the blow of my sword. How many chiefs, when they see me eager in the fight, throw away their arms, and save themselves by flight! I am the bold one. As to [85] the fire of war, I kindle it, and hurl the tribes into punishments and death. Death, in the direful combat, fears me, when the battle-dust rises; and the sand-cloud is like a blazing fire. My joy is in the encounter of heroes, when spears and swords clash in my grasp. How many battle-dusts have I dived into, fearless of calamities! ”

“ To God's proud City, and thine heart's desire,
Lucretius!
1887.
ENTHUSIASTS.
To the Rev. Percy Dearmer.
Let your swords flash, and wound the golden air of God:
Bright steel, to meet and cleave the splendour of His sun!
Now is a war of wars in majesty begun:
Red shall the cornfields ripen, where our horses trod,
Where scythe nor sickle swept, but smote war's iron rod:
Where the stars rose and set, and saw the blood still run.
So shall men tell of us, and dread our deeds, though done:
New annals yet shall praise time's fiercest period. ”

“ In all strife where courage is tested, and power, From the meet on the hill-side, the horn-blast, the find, The burst, the long gallop that seems to devour The champaign, all obstacles flinging behind, To the cheer and the clarion, the war-music blended With war-cry, the furious dash at the foe, The terrible shock, the recoil, and the splendid Bare sword, flashing blue, rising red from the blow. ”

“ Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. ”

“ “Conform to the enemy’s tactics until a favourable opportunity offers; then come forth and engage in a battle that shall prove decisive.” ”

“ And the kings stand by for battle,
And twixt these two is the fighting.
Bent on war the face of each is,
Ever moving or encamping,
Yet no swords are drawn in warfare,
For a war of thoughts their war is. ”

“ These personal narratives reveal the psychology of war in all its horrible reality—modern warfare on its gigantic scale—the genius of invention and organization applied to destruction. They reveal, moreover, the psychology of human nature and human emotions in all their moods and passions. ”

“ Beneath a burning sky:
He bivouacs; the night comes on;
His comrades 'round him lie—
O memories of the years long gone!
O years that now go by!
The vintager of Earth is War, is War whose grapes are men;
Into his wine-vats armies go, his wine-vats steaming red:
The crimson vats of battle where he stalks, as in a den,
Drunk with the must of Hell that spurts beneath his iron tread. ”

“ And the slogan of battle from beauty's fond arms
Roused the war-crested chieftain, his country to save;
The sunbeam that rose on our mountain-clad warriors,
And reflected their shields in the green rippling wave,
In its course saw the slain on the fields of their fathers,
And shed its last ray on their cold bloody graves.
O'er those green beds of honour our war-song prepare,
And the red sword of vengeance triumphantly wave,
While the ghosts of the slain cry aloud—Do not spare,
Lead to victory and freedom, or die with the brave ”

“ Why does the stately Muse of History, that delights in describing the valor of heroes and the grandeur of conquest, leave out these scenes, so brutal, and degrading, that yet form by far the greater part of the drama of war? ”

“ There is something in warfare, in its story and in its paraphernalia, which profoundly stirs the emotions and sends the blood tingling through the veins of the most peaceable of us, and appeals to I know not what remote instincts, to say nothing of our natural admiration for courage, our love of adventure, of intense movement and action. But this romantic fascination resides to no small extent in that very spectacular quality of which modern conditions are depriving war. ”

“ War, to us, was a superhuman vision in which the spirit lost itself as in some strange intoxication; a far-off, rose-colored horizon, etched with the black profiles of gigantic mountains; legion after legion, with flying banners and the sound of music, endlessly ascending the mountain-side; and high up, on the topmost ridges, surrounded by the enemy, our own figures far in advance of the others, dashing forward with brandished swords; while down the farther slope a torrent of foot, horse, and artillery plunged wildly through darkness to an unknown abyss. ”

“ As such a unification of interest in a strong and uninhibited movement, as a coördinated expression of deep desires, a multiplicity of action with a unity of purpose, so to speak, war is aesthetic in form although to mention such very general qualities does not go very far toward characterizing an object.
In its meaning as tragedy war contains and exerts a strong aesthetic appeal. With all its horrors, war fascinates the mind. As fate, death, history it inspires awe, and creates a sense of the inevitableness of events and of the play of transcendental and inexorable forces in human life. ”

“ All wars present a series of contrasts. Is not war itself the greatest of all contrasts of life? The antithesis of Man at Peace and Man at War is one with which the poets and artists have familiarized mankind all through the ages. And so, though we are in the thirteenth month of the overwhelming change which this, the greatest of all wars, has wrought in our lives, I find, on sitting down to record my impressions of the life and work of the British Army in the field, that I am continually reverting to the perpetual, the confounding contrast between the world at peace and the world at war. ”

“ But how much more grisly a sight is it, how much more outrageous and cruel, to behold man to fight with man, arrayed with so much armour, and with so many weapons? I beseech you, who would believe that they were men, if it were not because war is a thing so much in custom that no man marvelleth at it? Their eyes glow like fire, their faces be pale, their marching forth is like men in a fury, their voice screeching and grunting, their cry and frenzied clamour; all is iron, their harness and weapons jingling and clattering, and the guns thundering. ”

“ It is the acting of war. The song, which kindles enthusiasm, is first sung, with the same motive and the same effect as the martial music awakes it echoes on Christian plains, and then follows all the pomp and circumstance of war: arrows fly thick and fast, the tomahawk is wielded, the dead and dying strew the battle-field, and by various devices of paint and false scalps, hundreds are bleeding, when follows the shout of victory and the dirge for the slain. ”

“ There is much in "the pomp and circumstance of glorious war" to stimulate the combatants: wisdom has all the stern reality of the conflict, without any of its inspiring accompaniments—the martial strain, the glittering ranks, the floating banners, the roar of artillery, the shout of charging squadrons, and the clash of resounding steel. ”

“ Made strong by this, he endures the ordeal, the hazard of death, in the full splendour of the war, or at its sullen, dragging close, or in the battle's onset, or on patrol, the test of the dauntless, surrendering the sight of the sun, the coming of spring, and all that the arts and various wisdom of the centuries have added of charm or depth to nature's day. ”

“ One and all, we see the same sights. War is not the fine and splendid thing some of us at home believe it to be. There is dirt and cruelty and injustice in France, as well as glory and heroism. I have seen the good and the evil of the battlefields, just as I have seen the good and the evil of peace, and I have learned that the romance of war depends as much upon the thickness of the atmosphere as upon the square miles of the distance. It is pretty prosaic at close range; yet at the very worst of it, I have seen flashes of an almost inconceivable beauty. ”

“ The war is waging, slaughter raging, And heavy through the reeking pall, The iron death-dice fall! Nearer they close—foes upon foes "Ready!"—From square to square it goes, Down on the knee they sank, And fire comes sharp from the foremost rank. ”

“ One would say, standing upon an eminence, and surveying the smiling landscape, that this lovely plain was fashioned by the hand of the Creator as the abode of plenty and eternal peace. Yet a poet, remembering that it is not peace, but war that man loves, could not, in his dreams, picture to himself a more beautiful battle-field. ”

“ The main thing about them is just that they are extraordinary poems; by means of their psychology, no less and no more than by means of their metre, their rhyme, their intellectual form and their concrete imagery, they pierce us with flashing understanding of what the war is and means--not merely what it is to these individual pieces of ordinary human nature who are injured by it and who yet dominate it, but, by evident implication, what the war is in itself, as a grisly multitudinous whole. ”